This gritty, tense action film, full of violence, gallows humor, compassion and despair, reveals war as you have never seen it.
By: Bob Brown
Mathew Brady may have been the first to send back photos from the killing fields. Director Deborah Scranton is surely the first to send everyday soldiers into battle with video cameras. The result is this frank and disturbing film. Unlike news broadcasts or military propaganda, the infantrymen’s unvarnished perspective is front and center.
The featured troops are a National Guard unit from New England. Not your professional fighting men, these are for the most part "weekend warriors." They are like your neighbors. They have sweethearts or wives and children; they have mortgages and jobs; they have sometimes humdrum lives that are broken into by the call to service for a year in Iraq.
The year is 2004. Now that "Shock and Awe" has settled into a persistent toothache, these patriotic young men are ready to do something to pay back for Sept. 11, 2001. Never mind that Iraq has no connection with that fateful day. To guys like Steve Pink, 24, from Kingston, Mass., the service is a reliable source of money to pay for college. He has a bachelor’s degree in English and keeps a journal besides. "If it weren’t for the National Guard, I wouldn’t have been able to finish school, so in that lies my allegiance to the New Hampshire NG," Mr. Pink writes to filmmaker Scranton.
Mike Moriarty, 35, of Windsor, N.H., has a wife, a young son and military experience. His motivations are different. He re-enlisted just to repay the sacrifices he saw soldiers making. Before deploying, he wrote to the filmmakers, "To explain the extreme feelings a soldier has towards helping his fellow soldiers is almost impossible. It is something a soldier feels so strongly about that we simply disregard our own safety, well being and comforts to make sure we do our part to take care of our buddies."
Zack Bazzi of Watertown, Mass., is another young man with a military background, having spent four years with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division before going back to school. Ironically, he came to the U.S. at age 8 with his parents, who fled war-torn Lebanon. He lives with his divorced mother, who weeps for his return. Of all the soldiers, he is the most soldierly and the most philosophical. Because he speaks Arabic, Bazzi can empathize with Iraqis, as his fellow soldiers cannot. Nor do they want to. They value their lives more.
Cameras in hand, they keep a measured distance from the people and the events they record. Their vocabulary is peppered with four-letter words and tinged with irony. It’s a way of anesthetizing themselves to the horrors and to the meaninglessness all around them. One day they are kidding around with Iraqi boys who have souvenirs for sale: swords, cigarettes. The next, they are lifting into a body bag what’s left of a woman who crossed through a truck convoy to bring her children cookies.
On a clear horizon, the sky is a brilliant azure canvas pierced by plumes of fire and smoke. Blazing trucks on the roadside seem as common and unremarkable as palm trees.
But it didn’t start this way. The film begins with the soldiers in basic training, brimming with spirit and patriotism. Soon enough, their cameras are inside tent-barracks and mounted on the hoods of armored vehicles. Day by day, demeanors change as the action heats up. There’s a thin line separating patriotism from cynicism.
Back in New England, wives and loved ones are anxious and frustrated. All they want is their men home and life back to normal. But in Iraq’s dusty streets, the surreal is the new normal. The big questions aren’t the war or the meaning of life. They turn on whether mangled flesh resembles fresh ground hamburger or a medium-rare roast. No vocabulary is foul enough, no comparison disgusting enough, to handle the commonplace in a land gone mad.
What’s most shocking are not the grisly images of death and dismemberment (although they are more shocking than any other war film you have seen); it’s the nonchalance with which these guys-next-door now treat the cheapness of life their own and others’.
The cameras follow them home from their year in hell, different men whose women must reacquaint themselves with the strangers who had once been their best friends, their lovers, their sons, now changed forever.
This gritty, tense action film, full of violence, gallows humor, compassion and despair, reveals the war as you have never seen it. Nor are you likely to see it the same way again, with each newscast of the day’s toll. Although War Tapes is by and about soldiers in Iraq, it’s really about soldiers anywhere, doing a job in a situation they did not make. As Bazzi says, "I love being a soldier. But soldiers cannot choose their wars."
Not rated. In English and Arabic with English subtitles.

